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Comprehending and Creating Space for Inclusion


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Category
Seminar
Conference Name
ICSSR Sponsored National Seminar on Enabling Education: Equipping Students for life.
Conference From
18-Jul-2014
Conference To
19-Jul-2014
Conference Venue
TISS Mumbai

The Right to Education Act (2009) guarantees free and compulsory education to children aged 6 to 14. The Act is a way to provide an enabling environment to encourage inclusive education by promising quality elementary education which would reach even the most ‘unreached’ children. Diversity in its essence is captured by the Act in terms of recognising the disadvantaged members from all perspectives namely social, cultural, geographical, linguistic, gender and other such factors. While most understand and in some sense are accepting towards such disadvantaged sections for inclusion in schools, there are other categories of children who are either neglected deliberately owing to social circumstances or are victims of incomplete comprehension of the RTE Act itself. Inclusion also in this sense translates to various categories like street children, migrant children, child labourers, victims of bonded labour, children of conflict areas, children of manual scavengers as well as children whose parents are socially stigmatised like sex workers and HIV/AIDS patients. With 25% reservation now being strictly enforced in private schools as well, one has to wake up to the fact that such children are also to be brought under the umbrella of inclusion. This demands relooking at school policies and pedagogies and transforming them to respond to any sort of diversity in the most conducive, humane and equity driven manner. This paper will discuss the directives of RTE regarding inclusion whilst trying to suggest some strategies for bringing diversities in the forefront based on the premise that schools now have to not only acknowledge them but accept and embrace them.

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